Tell Me What You Think Of Others And I’ll Tell You How You Are

The way you see others can reveal a lot about your own character and personality. According to the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” people who rate others as honest, pleasant, and stable are those who feel the most satisfaction in their lives. On the other hand, those who have negative opinions of their peers are precisely the most antisocial, narcissistic and unpleasant.

In this study it has also been found that people who rate their peers in a positive way suffer less depression and anxiety disorders. On the contrary, people who are excessively critical of others are more prone to suffer from personality disorders, especially paranoid or antisocial disorders.

Specifically, in paranoid personality disorder, the essential characteristic is a pattern of general distrust and suspicion towards others, so that their intentions are interpreted as malicious. In turn, this implies that people with this disorder interpret neutral or positive messages such as offenses, teasing, belittling, etc. When in doubt about the intention of the other, a paranoid will choose the most unfavorable option. That is, the one that interprets what the other has done or said as an attack.

Leaving aside the personality disorders , there is always someone who lives criticizing everything and everyone. In each of our environments there is someone who thinks that the world is full of bad people. According to this study, regardless of whether you are right or not, this thought probably doesn’t exactly contribute to your happiness. What’s more, the natural thing is that he is an elusive and distrustful person.

We are mirrors

The exterior acts as a mirror for our mind, in it we see different qualities or aspects of our own being reflected. When we observe something that we do not like about someone and we feel rejection, in some way that aspect that we dislike may exist within us. Moreover, that rejection can only be a reflection of the rejection we feel for something that we are.

It is also possible that our unconscious, aided by our projection, makes us think that the defect only exists “out there”, in that other person. The psychological projection is a defense mechanism  by which a person attributes to other feelings, thoughts or own impulses that they deny or are unacceptable to themselves.

This mechanism is activated in situations of emotional conflict or when we feel threatened internally or externally. To reduce our internal discomfort, we focus on the outside all those qualities that we do not accept, attributing them to an object or subject external to ourselves. In this way, our mind apparently manages to put these threatening contents outside and fight in the real world against them.

A good part of what bothers you in others is just a projection

The internal world tends to color the external world with its own characteristics. Thus, for example, if we feel very happy, we usually look at the world around us with optimism and joy, expressing ourselves with phrases such as “today life is smiling at me”, “what a happy day”.

Obviously neither the day is happy nor life smiles at anyone. These qualities are really subjective and it is we ourselves who bring them out. The projection process is inherent to human mental functioning and, therefore, helps us to feel and think about the world as something humanized.

Very often, what we find difficult in others is precisely what we have not resolved within ourselves. If we had solved it initially, it would never have become a chronic problem. In these cases, the acceptance of our shadows and meditation will help us to know ourselves better and to integrate more than one perspective before moving on to the interpretations.